Are you seriously claiming that a policy of labeling and
testing units caused MCO to be lost?
Have you actually studied the mishap? If labeling and verifying the units was done carefully it would have prevented the accident.
A millinewton/newton mix-up could easily occur in a case like this one, too. The particular numbers which were misinterpreted in MCO's case were often small, and I can easily believe no one noticing similar ones being a few orders of magnitude off. (I do have a hard time imagining it with MCO's particular numbers, though.) Similarly, you can be bitten by a meters/centimeters switch or accidentally using different representations of the same quantity, such as specific impulse and its corresponding characteristic exhaust velocity, which only differ by a factor of about 10 when both are expressed in SI units.
I maintain that the key lesson is to always label your units, and to test them carefully and routinely, including at interfaces. I believe that claiming that using English units (as gross as they often are) caused the failure misses the more fundamental root problem.
(Also, I'm not claiming that labeling and verifying units is easy. I emphasize it partly because it's hard. Little of our current software ecosystem includes any concept of dimensionful numbers.)
Have you actually studied the mishap? If labeling and verifying the units was done carefully it would have prevented the accident.
A millinewton/newton mix-up could easily occur in a case like this one, too. The particular numbers which were misinterpreted in MCO's case were often small, and I can easily believe no one noticing similar ones being a few orders of magnitude off. (I do have a hard time imagining it with MCO's particular numbers, though.) Similarly, you can be bitten by a meters/centimeters switch or accidentally using different representations of the same quantity, such as specific impulse and its corresponding characteristic exhaust velocity, which only differ by a factor of about 10 when both are expressed in SI units.
I maintain that the key lesson is to always label your units, and to test them carefully and routinely, including at interfaces. I believe that claiming that using English units (as gross as they often are) caused the failure misses the more fundamental root problem.
(Also, I'm not claiming that labeling and verifying units is easy. I emphasize it partly because it's hard. Little of our current software ecosystem includes any concept of dimensionful numbers.)